The GNOME Project has ceased development, maintenance and support of the “org.gnome.Platform.i386.Compat” extension used in GNOME Flatpak Runtime to ensure compatibility with 32-bit applications. The extension offered 32-bit versions of GTK and GNOME libraries, used to deliver 32-bit applications in flatpak packages suitable for installation on 64-bit distributions that no longer ship 32-bit libraries (multilib). GNOME Flatpak Runtime is now only available for the x86_64 and AArch64 architectures.
The most popular 32-bit programs that ship in the flatpak format are Wine and Steam. It is noted that the discontinuation of support for the 32-bit version of GNOME Flatpak Runtime will not affect these packages, since they do not use 32-bit builds of GTK 4, libadwaita and WebkitGTK.
The desire to offload the infrastructure is mentioned as a reason for ending support for 32-bit systems continuous integration and get rid of problems that arise due to insufficient testing by project developers on 32-bit systems before pushing changes to the repository. There are situations where glitches that only occur on 32-bit systems block changes from being enabled in the GNOME repository. In addition, rebuilding results in an additional load on the infrastructure, the resources of which are limited, since for each module, the entire GNOME is rebuilt from Git at least twice a day, as well as a rebuild of WebKitGTK, the mozjs engine and several libraries and applications on Rust.
The resulting failures irritate developers who have to spend their time on support for assemblies that almost no one uses. It turns out that the 32-bit GNOME Flatpak Runtime in the Flathub directory uses only two packages, plus another package in Flathub Beta. Requests have been sent to the developers of these applications with changes that translate the packages to the main GNOME 49 Runtime. In Bottles change request is almost ready to be merged, and in projects Lutris and Minigalaxy still needs work.
It is also mentioned that after the GNOME Runtime build for architectures has stopped armv7 and i386, 32‑bit platforms are no longer used in quality testing before GNOME releases. If earlier, developers could guarantee that all GNOME modules would be compiled for the i386/x86 architecture, now the situation has changed and testing is carried out at the discretion of the developers of each individual module. Fixing issues specific to 32-bit systems is now optional for maintainers. Distributions that ship 32-bit builds of GNOME should do their own testing and troubleshooting for most projects.